Pioneering studios help revive neglected district

Jun. 24, 2012

Things start to change once you cross Academy on Pendleton Street. The road narrows, bars go up in store windows and paint falls away from the clapboard houses Brandon Mill left behind.

Save for a jeweler and a discount furniture store, the buildings here seem empty or abandoned. Studios are locked; the blinds are drawn.

Stay long enough, though, and life begins to stir. Leaning against the wall of an auto shop, two mechanics wave. Then a chainsaw buzzes in the distance, a cargo train barrels down the tracks and the door to Art Bomb opens as an 8-year-old girl on a scooter careens past in a blur of pink and purple.

This is where the Pendleton Street Arts District began.

Ten years ago, West Greenville was the last place left for artists that nobody cared about, said Diane Kilgore Condon, who opened Art Bomb studios in 2001.

Downtown real estate was getting snapped up. Above a shoe store on Coffee Street, architects were measuring the floors of Condon’s studio, where it would later become a real estate office. The West End was filling up, and artists were getting pushed out as the market turned fast and lucrative.

So they became pioneers, going as far west as they could until they found the old mill village on Pendleton Street, boarded-up and half-forgotten.

“It was beautiful even then,” Condon said. “There was something about it — it was like going back in time.”

Today, more than 30 artists have moved to Pendleton, Andrews, Smith Street and Lois Avenue. Their studios are open by appointment only. It’s art for art’s sake. Shows, not sales. This pure, unadulterated idea of living the life of an artist and finding your muse and not stopping until you have found it.

But the district is growing, and with that comes the fear that this last untapped frontier will be stripped down and made into another West End. It’s a delicate give-and-take for artists like Condon who want city dollars pumped into new sidewalks and landscaping but don’t want to see history repeat itself. This is a special place. There’s rawness here, yes, and strange, broken stories.

“Sometimes it’s good to understand what a different culture looks and sounds like,” Condon said. “We have to have some of that left in Greenville.”

Changes afoot

Condon can measure progress on the way home from Art Bomb after a long day of painting. There’s the hole on Calhoun Street where a condemned house was torn down this week and another house across the street, this one still standing, where a woman Condon had known for years used to live.

One day the woman was gone, replaced by a 20-something girl who answered the front door to her living room, repainted a scorching pink with gold-leaf mirrors and a sheepskin rug on the floor.

Up and down the neighborhood, artists and young couples are starting to buy up derelict mill homes at rock-bottom prices to flip around for a profit. It’s a shift that Condon didn’t think would come this fast or this far out, but the truth is a dollar here can go twice as far as it can downtown, and people have begun to notice.

“We can walk to Main Street if we wanted to, but we don’t want to pay Main Street prices because we can’t. We’re young and just getting started,” said indie designer Lily Wikoff.

Wikoff works out of her studio on 1269 Pendleton, in what used to be a salvage store filled with stacks of old doors and hinges. It’s almost unrecognizable now — walls turned into chalkboards, a catalog of jewelry arranged on chipped farm tables, handmade candles filling the room with a dusky vanilla scent.

She moved here five years ago, when Pendleton was a grittier, rougher version of what it is now, and investors like Richard Heusel and Michael Watts could see the potential in the abandoned dry cleaners, furniture outlets and storefront Baptist churches.

Those buildings became Village Studios and Gallery, Lily Pottery, Dabney Mahanes Studio and Liz Daly Designs. Later, more artists came, filling in a crooked spine that stopped at Art Bomb, a bookend on the very edge of city limits.

Watts, a financial adviser, owns a large swathe of property along Pendleton, including a ramshackle 13,000-square-foot structure with no roof, doors or windows that he plans to subdivide and lease out for $8 to $12 a square foot.

He hopes for an entertainment venue or restaurant, businesses that are related to the arts but more than just a studio. The kind of place that will attract a young, creative class drawn to the rough-and-tumble buildings around them.

“The future of this area is going to come from people who are 25 to 35. That’s what really is going to drive the growth out here,” Watts said.

Still, for all its inexpensive real estate and proximity to downtown, not many people make it past Academy Street. Either they don’t know what’s on the other side, or they’ve lived in the city long enough to know about West Greenville’s reputation as crime-ridden and violent, with drugs and gangs and prostitution.

Condon, who’s been here the longest and is known for taking in stray dogs, said living here is “different than what you would think.”

Homes do get broken into. There are drug dealers and prostitutes but, despite that, neighborhood children will come to her if an animal is in trouble. People stop to look at the art in windows, return the $5 they borrowed for gas and ask if they can take the old furniture sitting out on the sidewalk.

“It’s a community just like everywhere else,” Condon said.

The Far West End

Touches of the city start to show if you walk down Pendleton Street long enough. A sidewalk recently rebuilt, a pedestrian crossing put in, planter boxes filled with this season’s annuals.

For the most part, though, improvements made so far have been through the efforts of artists and the district’s business association, which has branded Pendleton Street as the Far West End.

They see this as a Southern version of what SoHo was 10 years ago and what Brooklyn is now — a small arts village with a few restaurants or bars and affordable apartments like West End Commons, where Wikoff lives with an enclave of other artists.

What they don’t want to happen, Wikoff said, is for the district to turn into a replica of the West End, where the city got involved once development took off and rents became so expensive that most artists couldn’t afford it anymore.

How that can happen with artists pushing for more name recognition while writing letters to the city to ask for more money for sidewalks is a balance that city leaders and stakeholders here have to work out together, said Mayor Knox White.

“It all comes down to who owns the buildings and, in this case, you’ve got some major landowners and building owners who seem very committed to the vision,” White said.

He points to uptown Charlotte’s arts district, NoDa, which he calls an almost carbon copy of the Far West End. Both started as dried-up mill villages left behind by their textile conglomerates until young artists trickled in and opened studios. But NoDa has housing, which White says this area needs, and it has retail and restaurants.

“What would strengthen us would be a stronger commitment to mixed use,” he said. “It has not quite reached critical mass, but it’s getting close to it as more people discover the area.”

Tracy Dozier, economic development project manager for the corridor, said that for now, the city is letting the Far West End market develop itself, but there is a vision that it will turn into a destination for visitors.

Dozier said future improvement projects include painting the rusting trestle bridge on Lois Avenue, which artists have pushed the city to do for years, and streetscape beautification to make the area more pedestrian friendly.

The city’s capital improvement program has also budgeted $100,000 for street and sidewalk improvements along Pendleton Street next fiscal year.

“There’s been a long planning process,” White said. “We’ve done some things for the last couple of years, but the larger amount is going to be spent once we have the street-scape in hand.”